History for Life:
Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Colin D. Pearce
University of South Carolina Beaufort
In his biography of William Gilmore Simms John C. Guilds says of
Literature
his subject that he had “a special fondness for history” and was, in
makes lessons Guilds’s view at least, “the only American author of the nineteenth
of history
century to envision, design, initiate, and consummate an epic pormeaningful.
trayal of the development of our nation.”1 Elsewhere Guilds says
that “Simms’s fullest expression of the relationship between history and art is found in the essay entitled The Epochs and Events of
American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction.” He goes
on to say that Simms’s theory of art “puts history in the forefront
as the subject for literature” while his theory of history “makes
literature the only true medium through which the accomplishments and lessons of history are made meaningful to man.” In
brief, for Simms, there is a unity of history and art and thus “[t]he
scholar who wishes to understand a people or an age must reach
and understand the poet-philosophers (i.e. the historical romancers) of that people and age.” 2 These remarks on the demands that
the craft of history makes on the historian to arrive at the fullest
possible self-exposure to the thought and art of the period being
studied and re-created remind us forcefully of remarks on the
Colin D. Pearce was William Gilmore Simms Professor at the University of
South Carolina in 2004 and currently teaches political science at that university's
Beaufort campus.
1
John C. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 1992), 333.
2
John C. Guilds, “Simms’s Use of History: Theory and Practice,” Mississippi
Quarterly 4 (1977): 506.
64 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
same subject made by Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus it is my purpose
in this article to discuss the balance of similarities and differences
between Simms and Nietzsche on the question of historiography.
In so doing I would hope to bring the American-“Romantic” and
the Continental-“Modern” understandings of the meaning and
nature of the “historical sense” into the same field of vision. To this
end I propose to focus on the second section of the work pointed
to by Guilds and on the second of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely
Meditations known best in the English-speaking world as “The Use
and Abuse of History.”
It is not a frequent thing for William Gilmore Simms to be associated with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The differences between the two nineteenth-century writers are evident enough. But
A. J. Conyers in discussing Simms’s theological views notes that,
while Simms “may not have admired the styles of Christianity he
found in its formal expression,” he certainly “did not go as far as
his younger contemporary Nietzsche, who said ‘in reality there is
only one Christian and he died on the cross.’” Nevertheless Conyers quotes lines from Simms—“ay better thousand times to be, the
pagan on some Sodomitic shore”3—to indicate Simms’s attitude to
“positive” or institutional Christianity.
Such an observation goes some way towards setting the tone for
the discussion that follows linking Simms and Nietzsche on history.
Nietzsche is famous for his Antichrist which was his great attempt
to lay the Christian religion to waste, and there is certainly nothing
comparable in Simms. But, if Simms was a Christian, “what kind
of a Christian was he?” asks David Aiken. Aiken notes that Simms
“was aware of the Higher and Lower Biblical criticism of his day”
and that Simms was held back from any serious intention of taking
on the Pulpit by his conviction that the New Testament was “However true and good, & wise & pure in many things, a wonderfully
corrupt narrative.” So even though he wishes to make the case that
Simms was at bottom a Christian Aiken must acknowledge that at
the least he was “no conventional Christian.”4
I shall argue that, although Simms “certainly did not go as far
as his younger contemporary Nietzsche” in arguing for the writ3
A. J. Conyers, “Simms’s Incarnational Theology and the Emerging American
Religion,” Southern Quarterly 41: 2 (2003): 87.
4
David Aiken, “A Christian in Search of Religious Freedom,” Southern Quarterly 41: 2 (2003): 97, 93.
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 65
Simms and
Nietzsche
rarely
compared.
Simms “no
conventional
Christian.”
ing of history as at one and the same time the supreme artistic
and supreme political act, still, he went a considerable way in that
direction. One thing we should note at the outset is the importance
to Simms of his vocation as a historian. This point is made strongly
by C. Hugh Holman. Holman says that if one places Simms’s
Francis Marion “beside the Elizabeth or Mary of Scots or James I
or Louis XI of Sir Walter Scott, the figure of Marion reveals how
completely Simms felt the restraint of history.” Indeed, Holman
says, “everything present in the Revolutionary romances has a
recognizable parallel in method in the Waverley Novels, except
for the chilling restraint with which Simms handled history.” Holman’s conclusion is that if Simms had been willing “to free himself
from the harsh bondage of fact” his books “would not suffer so
greatly from unevenness of dramatic tone and impact.”5 So we can
rest assured that Simms was as much an “empirical” historian as
he was fictionalizer and certainly was no simple fabulist. In the
view of some he might have taken the factual side of history with
more seriousness than was good for his art.
Holman also makes an important point for Simms’s relationOne of
ship to Nietzsche when he notes that Simms was keenly aware
genius's
of the fatalism or determinism implicit in Scott’s novels. Scott’s
"noblest
characters are active but at the same time “helpless participants
executions"
in occurrences beyond their control.” Scott’s stories “are finally
to show that
shaped by the iron mould of history.”6 The point here is that
individuals
can affect their Simms accepted that “genius” cannot distort or reshape history
own destiny.
that is well known to all. But at the same time he saw it as part of
“genius’s” “noblest executions” to show the human will at work
and how individuals can have an impact on their own destiny at
some basic level. It is important for the historical artists to show
that individuals can master history rather than for it to be eternally
the other way around.
But if Holman portrays Simms as under the severe “restraint of
history,” Jon L. Wakelyn argues for the essentially propagandistic
nature of much of Simms’s work. The fourth chapter of Wakelyn’s
book on Simms is in fact entitled “Historical Propagandist.” Wakelyn says that Simms “was formulating a view of history which
called for the historian to be a special pleader for a cause, to write
Devotion to
historical
factuality may
have hurt
Simms's art.
5
C. Hugh Holman, “The Influence of Scott and Cooper on Simms,” American
Literature 23 (1951): 212, 218.
6
Ibid., 205.
66 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
history as propaganda.”7 Wakelyn seems to be saying that Simms
has to be rated a “propagandist” because he is “philosophic” or
“artistic” in the way he treats of historical subjects. Wakelyn says
of Simms that he was “[d]edicated and myopic to the end,” and
“died as he had lived, in a romantic haze of his own propaganda
of self-deception.”8 But in what some might term the most “offensive” work in the light of contemporary values—“The Morals
of Slavery”—an essay which to be sure was clearly designed to
defend the South’s sectional interest, we find Simms beginning his
discussion not with a concern that the South never be criticized
but that the truth be known. “We should labor in her [truth’s] assistance,” Simms says, “not by persuasive and specious doctrines,
and fine flexible sayings, but simply by a firm adherence to what
we know, and to what we think we have already gained.”
As yet, we have, confessedly, but partial glimmerings of her divine
presence . . . [but] if we gather, each, but a single shell from the
great centre of truth . . . we shall at least diminish the toils of those
who shall follow in our own footsteps along the shores of the same
solitary and unknown regions.9
So if we take Simms even slightly at his own word we find he
is not constructing a simply ideological account of the South’s
sectional interest, or “propagandizing” for his vested interests,
but is engaged in a quest for truth, which he calls a “divine presence.” Simms might have had his “biases” and he certainly might
have been entirely wrong, but this is something different from being guilty of deliberately coloring the facts and making falsifiable
statements for the sake of some sub-rational, sub-philosophical
interest to which he has given his prior allegiance over the truth,
as it may be known to human reason.
Kevin Collins provides a useful counterfoil to the case of Wakelyn by focusing on the tendencies to “realism” in Simms’s fiction.
In doing so he also contributes to a justification of the SimmsNietzsche link. He portrays Simms as on his way to “realism” in
his novel The Cassique of Kiawah. In this work Simms’s characters
are neither “wholly heroic” nor “wholly villainous” and instead
of judging between characters who are “paragons of good and
Jon L. Wakelyn, The Politics of a Literary Man: William Gilmore Simms (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973), 119..
8
Ibid., 284.
9
William Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” Southern Quarterly Review
16 (1850): 156.
7
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 67
Though a
romanticist,
Simms
presaged
"what would
become the
conventions of
realism."
evil” the reader must come to understand characters who are
“equivalents in terms of . . . their moral codes.” We need scarcely
add that it was Nietzsche’s boast to have “danced over morality”
into a zone which is “Beyond Good and Evil” and that he considered this overcoming of romanticism in his thinking his greatest
achievement. Collins is willing to allow that Simms “remained a
romanticist until his death.” Nevertheless he thinks that “as his career progressed [he] began more and more to presage what would
become the conventions of realism.” Speaking of William Dean
Howells, Henry James and such like, Collins notes that, “Though
realism was perhaps an inevitable response to the social conditions and scientific developments of the later nineteenth century
as well as to an historical perspective that allowed them to critique
romanticism while decades removed from its heyday, Simms had
none of these advantages in 1859.” 10 Such a remark serves to isolate
the difference in perspective between Simms and Nietzsche as the
latter was indeed born about four decades after the former. What
was a trickle in Simms, a few decades later had become a torrent
in Nietzsche. We conclude that although there are wide differences between the American historical novelist and the German
philosopher or “psychologist” (as Nietzsche would say of himself),
there can be little doubt that at the same time there is also a kinship
between the two. This should become very evident in connection
with the question of the role of history in its relation to culture.
To begin, we observe a remarkable resemblance between the
title of the second subsection of Simms’s The Epochs and Events
of American History,11 which he calls “The True Uses of History,”
and the second and most famous of Friedrich Nietzsche’s four
Untimely Meditations (1874) entitled “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der
Historie für das Leben,” usually translated as “The Use and Abuse of
History.”12 We are struck immediately by the fact that both thinkers discuss history as something that can be “used” or as a “tool”
Kevin Collins, “Experiments in Realism: Doubling in Simms’s The Cassique of
Kiawah,” Southern Literary Journal (2002): 3, 11-12.
11
This essay was developed for lectures before the Historical Society of the
State of Georgia.
12
The title of this particular meditation of the four “Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen,” or “Untimely One,” as Nietzsche himself would call it, has been translated in
any number of ways, such as “The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for
Life” or “History in the Service and Disservice of Life” or “The Utility and Liability
of History.” For convenience’s sake I shall keep the traditional “The Use and Abuse
of History.”
10
68 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
to certain ends. But there is also an uncanny agreement between
the two men that the problem for modern man is the pernicious
effect of too much “realist” historical knowledge.
Both men of course love history and the story of the human
past as part of their general philanthropy or love of man.13 But precisely because of this philanthropy or “gift-giving spirit,” as Nietzsche would call it, they are troubled by the choking avalanche of
historical information that is accumulating at a breathtaking rate
in the nineteenth century, and which may lead to paralysis and
collapse on the truly human or “life-lived” level of existence. For
Simms and Nietzsche both, the problem of historical “digestion”
or an “excess of history” is key. How will modern man cope with
the reductive and “debunking” effects of the vast new reservoirs
of more factually accurate knowledge which historical research is
producing and which increasingly weighs him down?
Simms’s target in his lecture on “The True Uses of History” is
the “Cantabs of our own age” from which we learn that “those
exquisite and passionate narratives of Greece and Rome” contain
little that is “worthy to be relied on.” We have now learned that
these “narratives of soul and sweetness, which have touched our
hearts with the truest sympathy and enkindled our spirits with the
warmest glow of emulative admiration,” are really the product of
“cunning artists” in the form of “eloquent narrators and delicious
poets,” who have “dishonestly practiced upon our affections and
our credulity, making us very children through the medium of our
unsuspecting sympathies.”14
But for Simms the issue is not one between those who prefer
mythology and looking at the past through “rose colored glasses”
and those with a passion for hard, uncompromising truth. Indeed,
the more factually accurate or authenticated accounts of the past
are repellent precisely to “the most hearty lover of truth.” This
claim appears somewhat paradoxical. One might ordinarily think
In the “Prologue” to Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche has the hermit say to
the would-be prophet: “You lived in your solitude as in the sea, and the sea carried you. Alas, would you now climb ashore? Alas would you now drag your own
body?” Zarathustra answered: “I love man.” Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 11.
14
William Gilmore Simms, “The Epochs and Events of American History, as
Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction—Introductory. True Uses of History. Objects
of Art. Its Ductility and Universality.,” in C. Hugh Holman, ed. Views and Reviews
in American Literature, History and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 1962), 32.
13
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 69
To cut man off
from a history
pulsing with
life is to limit
his future.
that the lover of truth would be glad to see a more “factual” account. But precisely the opposite is the case for Simms. The “lover
of truth” is in some sense a lover of myth because myth, paradoxically enough, conveys more truth than the “facts.” For one thing,
the factually oriented form of history must have “authorities”
for any assertion of historical knowledge. But for Simms there
can be no such thing as “authorities” for historical truth of any
real value. The dependence on “authorities” constitutes precisely
the limits of the “rigid historian.” He cannot look to “the holiest kinds of truth—the truths of the greatest purpose, the purest
integrity, the noblest ambition, the most godlike magnanimity.” 15
The true historian puts “flesh” on the bones of history rather than
attempting to animate an articulated skeleton by a form of “moral
galvanism.” But inevitably Simms’s true historian will be met by
the “decapitative” question from the factualists: “Where are your
authorities?” It is in the face of such questions that the artist’s
courage must come to the fore. If the artistic creator is to be cowed
by the demand for “authorities,” he is finished in his vocation. He
has been crushed by “the past” in the sense of being paralyzed
by the demand that everything he says be squared with what has
been “empirically” verified by the scholars. “Alas! For the genius
who fears them!” Simms exclaims. These “pur-blind chroniclers”
whose vocation it is to disinter the “marrowless bones of the past”
would cut off contemporary man from a past with flesh on it. In so
doing they would limit his future. To follow their rules would be
to exclude any possibility that the future could be informed by a
body of historical knowledge where the vital flesh pulsates on the
factual bones.
In this context it is to Barthold Georg Niebuhr as the representative of “scientific history” that Simms addresses himself. Simms
expresses admiration for the “coldly inquisitorial” Niebuhr ’s
achievement and allows that this “sarcastic minister and learned
German” is indeed the greatest of all the “professed skeptics of
all detail in ancient history.” He has indeed made “a wreck of the
imposing structure of ancient history, as it comes to us from the
hands of ancient art.” He indeed discovers the “more certainly
true,” but whether this is sufficient to compensate for what we
have lost is not so obvious to those who have “a better faith in art.”
For Simms it is art which is “the greatest of all historians” and art
15
“True Uses,” 32.
70 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
is “better deserving of our confidence than that worker who limits
his faith entirely to his own discoveries.” In other words, the nonartistic historian can only speak of new facts he has uncovered
in his research. He cannot go on to inference, speculation, meditation, reflection—in short “philosophy.” He cannot generalize
because he cannot leave the level of “empirical” detail. He is the
“victim” of history, or is determined by what he thinks is history,
rather than determining it by his creative will or what Nietzsche
calls his “creative buoyancy.”16
Simms’s final verdict, then, is that “We [should] prefer Livy to a
cloud of such witnesses as Niebuhr.”17 Niebuhr is incapable of seeing that “the chief value of history consists in its proper employment for the purposes of art.”18 History is “raw material” meant to
be employed for “the erection of noble fabrics and lovely forms.”
Art employs history so that “the multitude” may be uplifted “into
gradual excellence and hope!” It is through art “that the past lives
to the counseling and direction of the future, and if she breathe not
the breath of life into the nostrils, the wires of the resurrectionist
would vainly link together the rickety skeleton which he disinters
for posterity.”19 The future, then, is dependent on the power of
the artist to create it, which he does by breathing life into the past
and thus giving it in turn the power to “counsel” and “direct” the
future. To use a Nietzschean locution here, the artistic historian or
historical artist “legislates for mankind.”
Nietzsche says of the Niebuhrian historian that he has learned
to answer the question: “How and why is life lived?” for “every
man, for every event, whether among the Greeks or the Turks,
whether from a day in the first or in the nineteenth century.” From
this “supra-historical” vantage point we “no longer feel tempted
. . . to go on living or taking part in history.” This is because, once
it is recognized that it is the blindness and injustice in the soul of
16
Simms is to Niebuhr as Sissy Jupe is to Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard
Times (which no doubt not coincidentally was inscribed to none other than Thomas
Carlyle). “In this life, we know nothing but facts sir: nothing but Facts!” Gradgrind
says in his “inflexible, dry and dictatorial” voice. When Sissy says she would like
pictures of flowers in her carpets, she is told: “You mustn’t fancy . . . . You are never
to fancy. Fact, fact, fact.” —Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Signet Classics,
1980), 12, 16.
17
“True Uses,” 34n.
18
Ibid., 34. Simms’s definition of the philosophy of history is a “happy conjecturing, of what might have been from what we know.”
19
Ibid., 34-35.
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 71
the man of action that is the precondition for historical events’ ever
taking place we become “cured of taking history too seriously.”
From the “supra-historical” point of view there is “no redemption
[to be had] in the process” because “the world is complete, fully
consummated, at every single moment.” “What could ten years
more teach them that the last ten could not?” Nietzsche asks. 20
In other words, from the “supra-historical” point of view all history looks like a chaotic mess imperfectly understood by those in it.
It has this appearance because the supra-historical historian lives in
a world of ordered prosaic facts. To use an analogy from psychology, the love between Romeo and Juliet or between Abelard and
Eloise is now known to be a series of biochemical reactions in the
lymphatic system and the brain affecting their external conduct.
It was no doubt that, yet Simms’s and Nietzsche’s point would be
that only those caught in the raptures of love would be in a position to fully understand what happened between these men and
women, which is to say, understand the historical truth about their
stories.21
What is known finally to the Niebuhrian historian remains a
mystery for the individual living and working within the dimension of history itself. By comparison to such an individual the
Niebuhrian historian is looking down on a marionette show from
behind the stage seeing all the strings which make the puppets
dance. But the audience of children at the puppet show forgets the
strings and thus sees the puppets as free actors. The man of action
is, in this sense, like one of the children at the marionette performance. He, like a child at the show, can imagine getting up on the
stage and pushing off one figure or overcoming another. The presupposition of action is a conviction of the possibility that things as
they are can be influenced or changed. As Nietzsche puts it, with
“historical men” as opposed to historical “scholars,” “a glance into
the past drives them on toward the future, inflames their courage
to go on living, kindles their hope that justice will someday come,
20
Friedrich Nietzsche, “History in the Service and Disservice of Life” (or “The
Use and Abuse of History”), in Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), “Use and Abuse,” 92.
21
In Hard Times Bitzer is asked to give “your definition of a horse.” Bitzer
replies: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four eye teeth,
plus twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring etc.” Bitzer has no sense that a strong and
beautiful animal galloping across the meadow is also part of the “definition” of a
horse. Hard Times, 14.
72 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
that happiness lies hidden on the other side of the mountain they
are approaching.”22 But the Niebuhrian disciple would ultimately
take us to a point where the potentially “historical man” would
only deal with actual history at the end of a barge-pole while
wearing rubber gloves, metaphorically speaking.
Nietzsche’s plea with regard to the historian’s craft is in essence
that of Simms. “If only we could get better at studying history in
pursuit of life!”23 Nietzsche’s standpoint is that of Life with a big
“L.”24 If we were to successfully study history in a life-enhancing
way, then “we could gladly admit to the supra-historical men that
they are wiser than we are; that is, if only we could be certain that
we have more life than they do. Then in any case, our unwisdom
would have more future than their wisdom.” In other words,
historical scholarship must be guided and controlled by a higher
power than itself. It cannot be “turned loose” as Niebuhr turned
himself loose on Livy’s Rome. “Insofar as it serves life, history
serves an unhistorical power, and because of its subordinate function, it could never, and should never, become a pure science like
mathematics.”25 That higher power is life itself which is “unhistorical” and is therefore the dimension within which, and not over
which, history plays its part. Scientific history is a “death trap” so
to speak.
So then the supreme contemporary question for modern man to
answer, as Nietzsche presents it at least, is the extent to which he
has enough life in him to control and guide the historical knowledge available to him. It is the “question of the degree to which life
needs the service of history.” This question is “of supreme concern
because it involves the health of a man, a people, or a culture.”
“Use and Abuse,” 93.
Ibid., 94.
24
“A historical phenomenon which is clearly and thoroughly understood, and
which is resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge, is dead to the person who
understood it, because he has understood the madness, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general, the whole dismal and earthly horizon of that phenomenon,
and thence its historical power too. To the extent that he is a knower, this power has
now become powerless in his hands, but to the extent he is still alive, it is not yet
powerless.” Ibid.
25
Ibid. “History, regarded as a purely scientific discipline and accorded supremacy, would resemble a balancing of the books of life and a liquidation of mankind’s
accounts. On the other hand, if historical scholarship is to be a beneficent enterprise,
holding future promise, it must itself move in the wake of a fresh and powerful
torrent of life—for instance, a newly emerging culture. History, therefore, must be
guided and controlled by a higher power not itself guide and control.”
22
23
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 73
Historical
scholarship
must be
guided by a
higher power
than itself.
The key point then is historical “overkill.” The modern mind is
simply generating too much history at this point. It is on a high fat,
high carbohydrate diet of historical knowledge which is leading to
obesity, diabetes, morbidity and death. We must cut down on our
historical calorie intake. “There is a certain excess of history that
causes life to degenerate and to be destroyed, and through this
degeneration, history itself is finally destroyed.” 26
Simms and Nietzsche are in full agreement here. There is no
To be effective point in multiplying the “number of facts and histories” by adding
history must more details to the careers of more monarchs, etc. Of such details
be viewed
we have “more than enough in possession for all the purposes of
imaginatively.
moral and human analysis,” Simms says. The problem, as Simms
puts it, is that historical details and information obscure nature
from view. But man needs access to the natural order for him to live
his life fully. Nature “is profligate in the way she expresses herself
in humanity’s doings and leaves us nothing to desire in the way
of material, whether for conjecture, or philosophy or sympathy.” 27
There may well be a “natural curiosity” to know the names of forgotten kings, but the best response to this passion is not, according
to Simms, to go in for what today would be archeological study.
Rather it is to hand all our concerns over to the only “genius” who
cannot be intimidated by the “huge and shapeless oblivion which
presides over a vast proportion of the globe.” Who is this “genius”?
His name is “romance and poetry” or “creative art!” This genius
will slake our curious thirst and satisfy our doubts about the past
accordingly as he deploys his powers.
Simms makes his case via the metaphor of an ancient statue
recovered from years of burial underground. Sages and “high
priests of civilization and philosophy” may gather around it and
assert varying theories as to its genuine origins. But to actually find
out whether it was Greek or Roman is not really to know anything
about the tale it embodies. It is the poet who interposes his art and
“furnishes the perfect history” while the “academic” debate rages
onward. In this context Simms turns to Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage and exclaims, “What a history is here!—how complete—
how true!”28 Byron puts Rome “in our eyes” with its “equal crime
Ibid.
“True Uses,” 35.
28
Ibid., 41. The quote is from Canto IV, stanzas cxl and cxli. Bertrand Russell
sheds some light on the character of Simms’s thinking when he says that Byron was
the “aristocratic rebel.” “The freedom he praised was that of a German Prince or a
26
27
74 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
and empire.” “Such a history, thus told us, is complete in all its
parts. It embodies many histories. Shall we consider it less true because it is attested in the undying measures of verse!” For Simms
the “touching truths” of Byron’s history in verse would not be
affected by exact knowledge of the provenance of the statue. This
is because “The moral objects of the poet and historian concern
not the individual so much as the race.” The objects “are not simply truths of time, but truths of eternity, and can only cease to be
truths in the decay of all human sensibilities.”29
In other words, Simms, like Nietzsche, sees art as the lifeforce which is guiding or controlling historical knowledge, by
directing it to the “moral objects” of the human race as a whole,
which is to say, something completely unhistorical or immune to
change. Like Nietzsche, Simms suggests that a humanity without
access to the “truths of eternity” or the experience of the unhistorical, would cease to be fully human—would have its human
sensibilities decay—in Nietzsche’s terms would “degenerate” or
be “destroyed.”30
For Simms the “record” of the past appeals to more “superior
faculties than those of either logic or conscientiousness,” and for
Nietzsche no ordinary talent will be up to the task which the “excess of history” places before us. To attain to any control or guidance of history requires not only a “loving immersion in empirical
data” but above all “a great artistic power,” and a “creative buoyancy,” which amongst other things allows for “a poetic elaboration
of given types.” This is what Nietzsche means specifically by “objectivity” of “a positive kind” as distinguished from the bloodless
objectivity of the scientific scholar. The thrust of Nietzsche’s case is
that the practicing historian must live up to his subject rather than
look down upon it from the lofty perch of hindsight. It is one thing
to have the benefit of hindsight, another thing to be spiritually
Cherokee Chief, not the inferior sort that might conceivably be enjoyed by ordinary
mortals.” Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1945), 747.
29
“True Uses,”42 .
30
According to scientific scholarship, Nietzsche says, “only that view of things
is true and genuine that is, scientific, which everywhere observes the becoming,
the historical element, always ignoring the being element of the eternal. Just as it
is inherently opposed to the eternalizing forces of art and religion, so too it abhors
all forgetting and the death of knowledge, as it struggles to annihilate every limitation of the horizon and plunges man into that eternally infinite sea of shimmering
waves, in the sea of known becoming.” “Use and Abuse,” 142-143.
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 75
The moral
objects of the
poet and the
historian “are
not simply
truths of time,
but . . . of
eternity.”
above the personage or character from the past whom one is trying to explain and understand. Those whom Simms would label
as “the dull seekers after isolated facts,” Nietzsche calls the “scholars.” But they are the same persons. They invest tremendous labor
in unearthing the facts of the past for a “miserable compensation.”
But it simply is not enough merely to “come later.” Rather, “As
judges you must stand above what you are judging.” 31
The key question for both Simms and Nietzsche is whether
there will be an artistic power of sufficient force and determination to control the “excess of history” and wrest from it that which
will serve the enhancement of life and man. For his part Nietzsche
hopes “that history may discover that its meaning is not general
ideas as the final fruit of its effort, but that its value lies precisely
in the spirited retelling, enhancing and heightening of the familiar
or even ordinary theme.” It should seek to turn the “everyday
tune, into a comprehensive symbol.” In so doing it would intimate
that there is “a whole world of profound meaning, power and
beauty” in the “original theme.” 32
“Meaning, power and beauty” then for Nietzsche. What about
for Simms? His “three fold triumph” occurs when the historian
“crowns his story with a moral, in which truth prevails in the embrace of the beautiful” 33—the moral, the true and the beautiful.
Nietzsche’s italicized point is that “Only from the highest power
“Only from of the present can you interpret the past.” “Only by the most vigorous
the highest
exertion of your noblest qualities will you sense what in the past is
power of the
present can great and worth knowing and preserving. Like for like! Otherwise
you interpret you drag the past down to your own level.”
the past.”
In sum, only men of experience and superiority can write history.
The man whose experience is not higher and greater than all other
men’s cannot understand the greatness and sublimity of the past.
The past always speaks with an oracular voice. Only as master
builders of the future, who understand the present, will you understand it. . . . By looking ahead, by setting a great goal for yourself,
you also master that excessive analytical drive which now devastates your present and makes all calm, all peaceful growth and
ripening impossible.34
“Use and Abuse,” 117.
Ibid.
33
“Review of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru,” Southern Quarterly Review 13 (1848):
31
32
139
34
“Use and Abuse,” 118.
76 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
Simms is clear on this point, too. The artist is the only “true historian” because he brings the historical character to life via his own
natural powers. It is the artist “who endows with life and action,
the otherwise motionless automata of history.” Not only that, “the
creative faculty” is in fact that human power which allows man “to
make himself known to man.” For Simms “romantic art” has a “vitative agency” and it is a fact that “many ages and nations are now
known only” through the offices of this power.35 This is because art
is the power which enables human beings to hold on to time and to
“be sure of the possessions of the past,” which is to say, hold on to
time such that he is able to transmit those possessions to the future.
“The dull seeker after bald and isolated facts is no philosopher,”
Simms says, but merely “a digger.” 36 The creator-artist-historian
is something else entirely. He possesses an “active imagination,
informed by experience, obeying certain known laws of study, and
recognizing, as guiding rules, certain general standards of examination.” 37
For both Simms and Nietzsche, then, objectivity in the sense of
neutrality or indifference is impossible and would be undesirable
if it were possible. What horrifies both writers is the professional
or scientific historian’s lack of passion. An “absence of feeling and
moral strength” is taken to be “a piercing coolness of observation.”
There is every chance that the historian’s objectivity could be a
cover for the utter want of passion and spirit in his very own soul.
But “positive” or desirable objectivity is to be seen in “that imperturbable calm of the artist’s gaze, inwardly flashing but outwardly
dark and impassive,” and this differs radically from “an affectation
of calm.” Nietzsche says:
In some cases banality of mind, that vulgar wisdom, which solely
by virtue of its own boredom creates the impression of disinterested
calm, sallies forth disguised as that artistic state of mind in which
the subject becomes silent and disappears from sight altogether.
Then there is the effort to suppress everything that might excite,
and the driest word is precisely the right word. Indeed, it is even
thought that a man to whom a past moment is of no concern whatever
has a vocation to describe it.38
“True Uses,” 47.
Nietzsche transforms this term “digger” into the “gravedigger” whose research digs graves for the characters of the past. Thus Spake Zarathustra, 21.
37
“True Uses,”36-37. “It is by such artists that nations live. It is the soul of art,
alone, which binds periods and places together.”
38
“Use and Abuse,” 117.
35
36
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 77
Objective
history
“of little
importance
to mankind.”
In a similar spirit, Simms insists that “objective history” would
be “of little importance to mankind.” “[D]ry, sapless history can
tell us nothing, which can tell us nothing more!” Sitting among the
ruins of Carthage “each man becomes his own historian.”39 Which
is to say, without the creative artist/historian as an intermediary
mediating between the past and the present, there is no history
properly so called. There are only the items observable to the individual person in the present, as they appear to him and as he may
or may not accurately remember them. It is the historian which
gives Carthage a history, and therefore gives “more than a purely
personal existence to everyman.” According to Simms, the best
historical method involves “[r]easoning of what should have been
from what is before us.” It is from the “probable” that we gather
the “true.” In the light of these considerations the dates and names
of “the mere chronologists” are “nothing.” The Simmsian historian
is busy “tracing hopes and fears, feelings and performances.” He
is searching for “the greatness which was, and the glories which
exist no longer.” He does not wish to be held up by “some cold
and impertinent querist” who “forbids our inquiry as idle” if we
cannot be precise as to names and dates. Simms is categorical here:
“History itself is only valuable when it . . . awakes noble affections,
—elicits generous sentiments,—and stimulates into becoming activity the intelligence which it informs!”40
39
In his use of this phrase Simms is pointing in the direction of the great twentieth-century historian Carl Becker. Becker says in his famous address to the American Historical Association of 1931: “Normally the memory of Mr. Everyman, when
he awakens in the morning, reaches out into the country of the past and of distant
places and instantaneously recreates his little world of endeavor, pulls together as it
were things said and done in his yesterdays, and coördinates them with his present
perceptions and with things to be said and done in his to-morrows. Without this
historical knowledge, this memory of things said and done, his to-day would be
aimless and his to-morrow without significance.” Thus the individual. Thus the nation. Everyman His Own Historian (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,1966), 235-36.
40
“True Uses,” 36. “Most of [the historians who live in democratic ages] attribute hardly any influence to the individual over the destiny of the race, or to
citizens over the fate of a people . . . . When . . . all the citizens are independent of
one another, and each of them is individually weak, no one is seen to exert a great
or still less a lasting power over the community . . . . [These historians] are wrong
in wholly denying the special influence of individuals because they cannot easily
trace or follow it.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York:
Vintage Books, 1945), 2: 90-92. Obviously it was Carlyle’s intention to cut against
the grain of the tendencies Tocqueville was describing, and we know how much of
an influence Carlyle was on Simms. “Show our critics a great man . . . [and they say]
“[T]he time called him forth, the time did everything, he nothing . . . . Such small
78 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
Given his true vocation, the true historian must claim certain
“privileges,” privileges which he would rather forgo than pursue
the enterprise without. These privileges include those of “heaping
conjecture upon conjecture, identifying facts with their classes,
tracing concealed character though a long series of details, educing
causes from associated results, and tracing upward, step by step,
by plausible suggestions, the several policies by which nations are
built up and made famous or overthrown and dismembered.”41 For
Simms, history is a living thing and the true historian is “the sort
of genius” who “learns to speak with a familiar confidence of his
subject.”
His imagination takes part with his judgment, officers and counsels
his thought, wings it to the desired fact, and vividly portrays to the
mind’s eye the hero and the event. Thence he becomes a limner, a
painter, a creator; and the picture glows beneath his hand, and the
drama dilates in action under his glance, and he becomes a living
and authentic witness to the past, and of all the circumstance she
has undertaken to unfold.42
This kind of historiographical genius obviously takes certain liberties in his work when viewed from the strictly factual or “empirical”
point of view. But at the same time he cannot create ex nihilo. The criterion by which this work will be judged is a conformity to “known
properties and generally recognized probabilities.” The plausibility
of an historian’s work is connected to its possible favorability to the
“cause of humanity and virtue” and its salutary effects on “the understandings of those to whom his labors are addressed.” An invigorated
yet plausible rendition of past people and events is the means by
which the historian can have an impact on “future ages.”
In highlighting some of what he takes to be William Prescott’s
weaknesses, Simms provides us with a description of a philosophical historian.43 Simms distinguishes between historians who are
critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal spiritual paralysis . . .
[but] in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men’s hearts
a certain altogether peculiar reverence for great men . . . . Hero-worship endures
forever while man endures.” Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in
History (New York: A. L. Burt, n.d.), 14-16.
41
“True Uses,” 37.
42
Ibid.
43
Southern Quarterly Review 13 (1848): 136-183. Here Simms cites as “living instances” of philosophic historians the French writers Guizot and Michelet. He also
cites Gibbon and Thierry as examples of historians who unite “the faculties of the
philosophical and narrative historian.”
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 79
The true
historian’s
“imagination
takes part with
his judgment,
officers and
counsels his
thought.”
“simply narrative” and those who might be truly called “philosophical.” The narrative ones are distinguished by, amongst other
virtues, “closeness of detail.” But “the philosophic historian belongs to a more ambitious school.”
He is not so much a narrator as an essayist. His labor is not so much
after details as after principles. He disdains minutiae in his search
after generalities, and is better prepared with speculation than
with fact . . . . He looks not so much to the actions, as to the motives
and the moods of rulers; and prefers to hurry over the narrative,
which unfolds the downfall of an empire, in order to show how
profoundly he can discuss the conditions by which such overthrow
became inevitable . . . . His tests are those of the lawyer and the philosopher. He cross examines with the one, and dilates into generalities with the other. He corrects the morals of history, as he exhibits
the mistakes of governments and people; showing why and where
the ruler falters by what errors of policy—by what weaknesses of
judgment—by what severities of sway—by what caprice as of passion, and mistakes of fact. He is in brief a philosopher, who chooses
to take history for his subject of analysis, rather than morality or
art,—and embodies these, as topics, to which his theme, itself, is
rendered tributary. 44
Simms’s call for a “new history writing” more open to philosophy or ideas of national destiny is echoed by Nietzsche’s insistence
that we should never turn our backs on a subject simply because it
is familiar. Nietzsche says that we should above all be aware that
the deeper value of history “lies precisely in the spirited retelling,
enhancing, and heightening of a familiar or even ordinary theme,
an everyday tune.” “The true historian must have the power of
making the familiar sound like something wholly new.” 45
Likewise Simms says that “the study of mere facts” must be
subordinated to a concern for “our own progress.” There must be
an ulterior design to the immersion in the empirical detail. Otherwise one would be absorbed in that which would be “utterly
unimportant to ourselves and our children.” There may be a kind
of implicit or intrinsic true narrative of history, involving the putting of its myriad facts all in a row, but it is really only “the great
moral truths” for which we care and which “induce excellence in
the student.”46
As an example in this context Simms alludes to the much vexed
“True Uses,” 37.
“Use and Abuse,” 117-18.
46
“True Uses,” 37.
44
45
80 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
question of “who built the pyramids, Cheops or Cephrenes?” In
this particular case the “philosophical historian” looks at the pyramids and sees that they were the work of “a merciless despotism”
and constitute “an equal trophy of miserable vanity and of absolute
power.”47 The number and weight of the blocks of stone of which
the pyramids were constructed are of secondary importance when
compared to the social system that created them or, more precisely, to the human psychology or “philosophical anthropology”
that explains the social system which built them. The “veracious
chroniclers” can add nothing to the “great moral truth” respecting
the pyramids of which we are already in possession. “That moral
truth, educed by thought from conjecture, is one wholly independent of details.” Indeed, even if new details come to light which
force an adjustment of heretofore accepted facts about the pyramids it would have no impact on the point that they are embodiments of “miserable vanity and absolute power.” The conclusion
that they were embodiments of such phenomena is not arrived at
through calculations of the time spent, laborers employed, materials used, techniques involved, etc. It is a moral conclusion based
on an “inference from the human passions,” to use the language
of Hobbes. The various factual details about the pyramids cannot
by themselves establish the truth that they were the products of
“miserable vanity and absolute despotism.” Thus a change in the
factual knowledge concerning them would have no effect on this
“moral” claim. To exaggerate Simms’s point for a moment, the
only way for the facts to affect the moral claim would be for the
pyramids to be shown as having been all along nothing but a few
humble huts in the desert inflated by legend into great monuments
of stone. Then the conclusion about the vanity and despotism of
the Pharaohs may have to be revised, but not otherwise. 48
But for all the praiseworthiness of the poets’ services to history,
Simms hastens to add that there is even a higher level of historiog Ibid., 38.
Ibid., 39. Simms would see a very clear distinction between scriptural and
philosophical history. In scripture there are miracles. Miracles may have an object
lesson in the sphere of morality, conduct and character, but their presence in a
narrative would take us beyond the bounds of history as Simms presents it here.
Simms does not go so far as to say that history is a discipline without boundaries
or limits in relation to experienced reality. He very clearly stipulates that the more
philosophical historian writes his account only when “the means of his refutation
are not to be had.” The philosophical historian “offends against no facts which are
known and decisive, no reasonable probabilities or obvious inferences.”
47
48
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 81
raphy than that of the Byronic poet. For the poet’s historical work
gives rise to a passion in others which he himself cannot gratify. As
a result “another genius is summoned to continue the progress into
the dominions of the obscure and the impalpable,” which the poet
“fears to penetrate.”49 This genius is the “romancer” or “novelist”
who goes beyond the level of “conjecture” that the poetic historian
is allowed to the very “liberties of creation.” Both the historian and
the romancer may well be obliged by a rule that their first duty is
“the benefit and blessing of the races which they severally represent,” and both have in their care “the holy trusts of art” in its role
as a stimulant “to ardency in the grand and unceasing struggle
after perfection.”50 But the romancer takes possession of the fruits
made possible by the historian’s mixture of “doubt and promise.”
While the “historian” supplies “the motive for human action
where the interests of a state, a nation are concerned,” the “romancer” or “novelist” inquires into “the recesses of the individual
heart.” Both figures should blend clarity of mind and judgment
together with “a lively fancy” and a “vigorous imagination.” But
if the historian’s subjects have more “dignity and grandeur,” those
of the “romancer” have “more delicacy and variety.” “Gravity”
accompanies the historian because of “the vast interest involved
in the discussion.” The romancer, on the other hand, has a subject
that is more attractive because he can reveal “those more ennobling
virtues of the citizen, which, as they are seldom suffered to show
themselves beyond the sphere of domestic privacy, are not often
permitted to glide into, and relieve the uniform majesty of history.” Here Simms ventures the opinion that Sir Walter Scott was
“himself a greater historian in some of his novels than in any of his
‘histories.’” 51
Simms is optimistic that even though the modern scientific apShakespeare’s proach is on the rise, the countervailing view that the greatest hisfictional
torian is “art” itself is gaining ground as well. “Philosophy” now
chronicles of
sees that Shakespeare’s chronicles of England are as true as those
England truer
than Hume’s of David Hume, and indeed even truer than those of the latter with
respect to “the great and leading characteristics of society and huhistorical
chronicles.
man nature.” Sir Walter Scott is now seen to be making the “unnatural and formless” features of “skeleton history” more appropriate
Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 44.
51
Ibid., 44-45.
49
50
82 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
in terms of “symmetry and proportion.” Scott’s Ivanhoe had in fact
opened the way to more modern research into the history of SaxonNorman relations by showing that there had been a great struggle
for supremacy between the two groups after the Conquest. The
poetic historian or “romancer” confers on the narrative of the past
a “rich mellowness” which advances “popular thought,” and this
in turn will lead to the recovery of “many more perfect narratives
concerning periods in our chronicles of which, at this moment, we
scarcely acknowledge any want.”52
So here we have the case that, regardless of all other considerations, romance, fiction, or, more broadly, “art,” is prior both
chronologically and intellectually to scientific history. “No Scott,
no Ranke/Niebuhr” is the claim. This being the case, to abandon
philosophic–artistic history for the scientific method would be like
giving up three square meals a day for frequent intravenous injections supplying the equivalent nutrients to the body. One might endure under such a regimen, but it would completely overturn the
way in which life was lived on a human level. There would be no
socializing or conversation over the dining table and so forth. The
point is that the actual nutrients are a necessary but by no means
sufficient condition for a fully human life and are not prior to, but
coeval with, such a life.
We have seen that for Simms art is a “vitative agency.” It is such
because the practice of “romantic art” leads to the creation of conjectural histories which “all nations and ages have possessed” and
which constitute all that is known about these peoples and times at
all. The poet and the romancer make “monuments” from the “epochs” and “materials” available. “Let your grave lovers of skeleton
history ask if these questions have ever been answered by the drybones for which they dig,” Simms says. For Simms, it is the creative artists who preserve the connection between the past and the
present and therewith the future. The “painter” and the “minstrel”
52
Ibid., 46-47. H. Stuart Hughes heartily concurs with Simms here: “If there was
an imaginative writer of repute who ‘got things all wrong,’ it was he. Yet his novels
of chivalry and ‘derring-do’ (even his vocabulary was phoney) cradled the fancy of
generations of future historians. . . . In Ranke’s case, the Waverley novels lit a bonfire that blazed for eighty years. Today there must be other historical romances—
doubtless much better ‘researched’ than were Scott’s—which are kindling the same
wild flame. And a teacher of history would be greatly in error if he should inadvertently put it out.” H. Stuart Hughes, History As Art And As Science: Twin Vistas On
the Past (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 105.
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 83
Literary art
prior both
chronologically
and
intellectually
to scientific
history.
endure while the “statesman” and the “chronicler” are “dust.”
They have no songs which become the songs of a whole people as
did those of Scott, Byron, and Shakespeare. What Simms means to
say is that the “painter” and the “minstrel” are “the voices for the
ages” in that they put the “unfading halo” on the vanished empires
and “govern infant nations with a deathless moral.” 53
According to Simms, the poetry or romance that deals with “na“A national
tional events” possesses a sort of “symbolical influence upon the
history,
people’s minds, and seems indeed, to become a visible form and
preserved by a
national poet, existence in their eyes.” The “events of a national history, which
we can associate with a place and with a name, endowed with
becomes, in
fact, a national vitality by the song of a poet,—will make that place sacred. . . . A
religion.”
national history, preserved by a national poet, becomes, in fact, a
national religion.” The “spell of genius” makes sacred “the ruins
of time” and in so doing “preserves itself from oblivion.” The “inspired bard” conducts the children down to the fourth and fifth
generation “to the high places of glory” and for this they pay him
“homage.”54
So the artist cheats death both for himself and his country by
creating “sacred” things in the national memory. Pericles is the
name we associate with the “Funeral Oration” commemorating
the fallen Athenian soldiers in the Peloponnesian War, and it is
Lincoln’s name that was made immortal at Gettysburg after the
battle was over. The names of Pericles and Lincoln “liveth forever
more” as a result of delivering a funeral speech in which the names
of the soldiers being buried are never mentioned and have long
since been forgotten. Perhaps no words in a public speech were
destined to be less strictly accurate than those uttered by Lincoln
at Gettysburg when he said: “The world will little note nor long
remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did
here.” The tones of “The Gettysburg Address” are recognizable
to one degree or another by any who have even the most passing
knowledge of modern history; but only a minuscule minority of
such people could describe the details of “what they did [there]”
“True Uses,” 48-49. “The antidotes to history are the unhistorical and the suprahistorical. . . . By the term historical I mean man’s skill and power to forget, his ability
to seclude himself within a limited horizon. By supra-historical I mean those forces
which direct our eyes away from becoming and toward that which gives existence
its eternal and unchanging character, toward art and religion” (“Use and Abuse,”
142).
54
“True Uses,” 54-55.
53
84 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
Colin D. Pearce
in the great battle being commemorated. This fact is a testament to
the truth of Simms’s claim that the fame of the poet is destined to
far outlast that of the historical actors who have served as the raw
material for his art.
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Humanitas • 85